Seeing the machine being used and appricated is what makes it worth putting in all the time doing the restoration. Suspect this goes for the people who have worked on all the other machines. Let me know if you have ideas on what else would be useful for demos. Lots of good work is being done. On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 02:48:44PM -0500, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The Mid-Atlantic campus has been kicking butt for the last year. My main concern is the museum, which has been pivoting into a computing history learning experience in order to hopefully become much more of "thing" on the east coast, appealing to both tech interested & STEM audiences as well as laymen.
Here are a set of photos of a recent early morning high school student visit with docent Thomas Gilinksy demonstrating the PDP-8. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MWbqQhDESH5vS0Z_ZMsbLMLenO5bsUL7?usp... Note the poster of Olsen behind the PDP-8, part of a continuing to effort to honor company founders of the equipment we have and tell a bit the founder's and company's history.
In the background of photo 2 and 3 you can see the partially completed exhibits of the PC add-in cards angled towards the viewer.
We are now routinely doing paper tape loads and demo programs thanks to David Gesswein's dedicated attention to the straight-8 and Rick Lewis's excellent PDP-8 instruction document. We had 45 high school students come through in three groups of 15 early Wed AM with Thomas, Bill I, and myself as docents. Though we only had 1/2 hour with each group, we packed a lot in and they were very very attentive. One student, suitably impressed, came right back with his brother and brother's girlfriend on Saturday.